Piet Dirkx cigarbox 769
Andre de Dienes (1913-1985)
Dienes began work as a professional photographer for the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, and was employed by the Associated Press until 1936, when the Parisian couturier Captain Molyneux noted his work and urged him to become a fashion photographer.
In 1938 the editor of Esquire, Arnold Gingrich offered him work in New York City, and helped fund Dienes’ passage to the United States. Once in the United States Dienes worked for Vogue and Life magazines as well as Esquire.
When not working as a fashion photographer Dienes travelled the USA photographing Native American culture, including the Apache, Hopi, and Navajo reservations and their inhabitants. Dissatisfied with his life as a fashion photographer in New York, Dienes moved to California in 1944, where he began to specialize in nudes and landscapes.
As well as Monroe, Dienes also photographed such notable actors as Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, Ingrid Bergman, Ronald Reagan, Jane Russell, Anita Ekberg and Fred Astaire.
De Dienes married twice, and died of cancer on April 11, 1985, in Hollywood.
( the above text comes from Wikipedia)
One of the lesser known nude photography publications in which de Dienes made several contributions is available at www.ftn-books.com
Piet Dirkx daily …768
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 768
Anthon Beeke (1940-2018)
This morning i learned that one of the greatest of all dutch graphic designers, Anton Beeke, died in an Amsterdam hospital, yesterday on the 25th of September. Born in 1940 he soon became part of Fluxus and Provo and was one of the famous names in the AMSTERDAM art world in the sixties. He even became later a contributing partner of Total Design, the agency which was founded by Wim Crouwel ao. I mention this because where Total design was one of the first agencies to apply the computer in designing, Beeke stayed true to his own method, the typical way of composing an image with “camera, scissors and glue”.
His images are strong and stood out and drew immediate attention to the subject. One of his best known designs was the alphabet composed with nude woman.
It was a meant and searched for reaction on the New Alphabet by Crouwel. There are several Beeke publications available at www.ftn-books.com
Piet Dirkx daily …767
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 767
Beppe Kessler (1952), Jewelry and Paintings
Beppe Kessler is one of those artists who grows on you. Educated on the Rietveld Academy , she soon found her way into the Gallery circuit with frequent exhibitions all over the Netherlands in the Eighties. What makes her work special is the use of materials which are not commonly used for jewelry. For example she uses nylon tissues and balsa wood within her jewelry. This really makes her jewelry stand out from other designers, ………but there is more to Beppe Kessler. She is also a painter and this is where my interest originated . If you look at her paintings you might think you are looking to a child of a Constructivist father and an organic hairy mother.
These paintings are exceptional. Their sizes differ, but even in the smallest of paintings you can see the personal “signature’ of Beppe Kessler. The book that www.ftn-books.com has in its inventory is from a special edition of 500, signed and numbered but what makes it really special is the cover. All 500 covers are different and this one is one with 4 pins sticking out, making it a true Kessler painting.
Piet Dirkx daily …766
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 766
Zoltin Peeter (1942)
Born in Amsterdam but living for the most part of his life in Friesland near Hallum. His works reflect the presence of the rural country side nearby. Abstract forms tumbling in an empty space. Etchings with dark thin forms in an empty white space give me the feeling of ZERO art, but it certainly is not. They fascinate and deserve to be known much better. Peeter has had some exhibitions in the 70’s in prestigious museums like the Kroller Muller Museum. The first encounter with a small work by Zoltin Peeter was his multiple he made for his 1971 exhibition in the Lakenhal. The multiple is available at www.ftn-books.com and shows directly the directions he was taking with his works. decades later you can see where is ended for now. Abstract forms, sparce use of color and in many compositions a realistic form or subject appears. I love his work and his studio…..
His studio is something different. Housed in an old shed he creates his works in the vicinity of the Friesland landscape. I found some beautiful photo’s on Google and want to share these with you , because i find them very special and they give the best impression possible of the surroundings in which Zoltin Peeter creates.
Her are the items which are for sale at www.ftn-books.com and ftn art
Piet Dirkx daily …765
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 765
Alighiero e Boetti (1940-1994)..an Arte Povera artist
Another artist who really died too young was Alighiero Boetti. One of those artists who you learn to appreciate over the years. At first glance you walk past his paintings, but when you encounter them more and more in museum s and sometimes in art galleries you learn to appreciate them and now i stop at every one of them i encounter. You are first struck by their graphic quality and later by the consistent high quality of these large canvasses and in many cases they are a source of inspiration for other artists:
left : Alighiero e Boeti . right : Kang-Ik Joong
and left Alighiero e Boetti and Right: Otto Egberts from Schaamstreken 4
At one time there was a nice Alighiero e Boetti catalogue available at the De Slegte . Without knowing that Franz Kaiser was the curator for this exhibition in Grenoble , i bought a stack of these catalogues of which a few copies still remain and are available at www.ftn-books.com
Here is a short biography i found on the internet Boetti which proves that he is important and deserves his place amonmg other great Italian artists
Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin, to Corrado Boetti, a lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist. Boetti abandoned his studies at the business school of the University of Turin to work as an artist. Already in his early years, he had profound and wide-ranging theoretical interests and studied works on such diverse topics as philosophy, alchemy and esoterics. Among the preferred authors of his youth were the German writer Hermann Hesse and the Swiss-German painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee. Boetti also had a continuing interest in mathematics and music.
At seventeen, Boetti discovered the works of the German painter Wols and the cut canvases of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana. Boetti’s own works of his late teen years, however, are oil paintings somewhat reminiscent of the Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. At age twenty, Boetti moved to Paris to study engraving. In 1962, while in France he met art critic and writer Annemarie Sauzeau, whom he was to marry in 1964 and with whom he had two children, Matteo (1967) and Agata (1972). Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s amidst a close community of artists that included Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others, Boetti established himself as one of the leading artists of the Arte Povera movement. From 1974 to 1976, he travelled to Guatemala, Ethiopia, Sudan. Boetti was passionate about non-western cultures, particularly of central and southern Asia, and travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan numerous times in the 1970s and 1980s, although Afghanistan became inaccessible to him following the Soviet invasion in 1979. In 1975, he went back to New York.
Active as an artist from the early 1960s to his premature death in 1994, Boetti developed a significant body of diverse works that were often both poetic and pleasing to the eye while at the same time steeped in his diverse theoretical interests and influenced by his extensive travels.
He died of a brain tumour in Rome in 1994 at the age of 53.
